July 30, 2008

Remember Captain Planet on saturday morning cartoons? He and his weird gang of children stopped evil corporations from intentionally and with malice polluting and despoiling the planet. I always thought it was a bit hokey b/c I didn’t think people were that willfully malicious about polluting. I figured they were trying to make money and just being willfully ignorant of the problems they were causing. Not intentionally malicious.

And then you read something like this. And you think. Well, maybe they are being willfully malicious.

“… the suit accuses Chevron of responsibility for the dumping (allegedly conducted by Texaco, which Chevron bought in 2001) of billions of gallons of toxic oil wastes into the region’s rivers and streams.”

Yes, they dumped toxic oil wastes into the amazon. Apparently later they went out and roasted and ate a whole bushel of kittens to celebrate.

July 25, 2008

So, I’ve noticed a bunch of posts saying that they couldn’t believe that moblin’s reason for moving from ubuntu to fedora was the use of rpm vs deb. I’m a little surprised at that. Anyone who has built a deb package recently vs building an rpm package should see the obvious advantages. The learning curve for putting an rpm together is not nearly as steep as it is for debs. Not to mention the patching mechanism.

So, don’t be so surprised at the choice of distros due to the packaging format.

Having said that, I think the ‘always upstream’ mantra that we’ve been chanting in fedora for a while is a pretty good draw. Moblin as a downstream consumer of fedora knows that if they pitch things back to us they’ll likely go up the tree to the right people.

July 23, 2008

Let’s say I have a bunch of admins working on a bunch of systems. I know they try hard to make sure that anything they change on a machine to fix a problem is also put into our config mgmt system but I also know that at 3am you can’t always remember to do that. So, I want to be able to make sure we know if things have changed. Something like this:

July 21, 2008

Saturday morning – midnight – watched the ending to dr. horrible. The ending, while a bit sad and dark was still fantastic. Consistent with what Whedon has done on many other occasions and as one commenter on whedonesque.com wrote: “This is an origin story” which gives it more sense. Thoroughly enjoyed the musical and while I’d be happy to see more of them, b/c they’re fantastically funny, I’m fine with the ending we got out of it.

Saturday afternoon it was hot and kinda miserable outside so I went to one of the coffeeshops nearby and I wrote some more on some docs I’ve been working on. They’re shaping up reasonably nicely. Mostly they’re docs to fill in the spaces on some of the things yum/createrepo/yum-utils can do and to help explain things about how and why to manager repos and systems in certain ways. If you want to see more you can look in the yum-docs git repo.

Saturday evening went out in the torrentially pouring rain for the habitat for humanity full moon ride. The last time I did this ride it was wet and spitting rain and completely covered in clouds. This time it was raining like piss from a boot when I started out and visibility was, umm, poor. It would have been better if I hadn’t forgotten my bag when I left and had to turn around on my way there come back and get it. But the thing to remember is this: Once you decide you’re okay being soaked all the way through on every layer, it really does get easier. It was just an enormous amount of water, after all. 🙂

It ended up drying off and clearing away which was good, we actually got to see the moon, which was nice for a change. I kinda wish they hadn’t made us stop every 3 miles or so, that got a bit old.